Late at night when you're all alone
Take a ride to the danger zone
If someone wants to cut you down to size
You never argue with a loaded .45 - The Scorpions, "Hit Between the Eyes"

Maybe because I have so many of my own, I've always been a sucker for a hard luck story. And because I'm a head banger from way back, I'm always on the lookout for the next Metallica. Acrassicauda appeals to both.

To my reckoning, they're still the only heavy metal band to ever come out of Iraq. Their dark, heavy, ugly-sounding Latin-based moniker translates to "black scorpion" and is a perfect onomatopoetic name for what they are and what they play. They were written up in the New York Times just under a year ago and the article by Ben Sisario only alludes to the danger, prejudice and persecution these four young men had faced while trying to keep their group alive in Baghdad. If you want a visual impression of what life was like for them, click on the title of this post and if you have 84 minutes to spare, watch the 2007 documentary on them.

While struggling valiantly to avoid political and geopolitical overtones, Vice Records, the makers of the documentary, couldn't merely present the rise of just another heavy metal band. Acrassicauda is not just another up-and-coming heavy metal band. For starters, they originate from Baghdad, Iraq, a city still plagued by death squads, homegrown terrorists, insurgencies and corrupt militias. It's a city in which the average resident gets perhaps 2-4 hours a day of electricity, a fact that alone would kill most rock and roll bands that rely exclusively on amplifiers. At one point, a gig in a Baghdad hotel is interrupted when the power went out. Before their hovel of a rehearsal venue was bombed, they had to use generators and they had to carry loaded .45's on their way to rehearsals.

They lived a life straight out of "Hit Between the Eyes" by their German namesakes, the Scorpions. If you want an idea of what it's like to be a heavy metal musician in Iraq, the ultimate anomaly, if you want a taste of the prejudice to which American rock and roll pioneers were subjected in the 50's, watch "Heavy Metal in Baghdad." Imagine fearing being jailed for growing your hair long or even just for wearing a goatee or for being mistaken for engaging in Jewish religious rites simply for violently moving your head. I think it's a safe bet Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and Chuck Berry never had to go through any of that. And that freedom and democracy was mainly after the American invasion and occupation.

As if that isn't hard enough to imagine, try to imagine how difficult it was for the band's founding members to come across the Western style of music they now play. There are no rock and roll radio stations in Iraq, no Strawberry's or Sam Goodies. One of the few guitar shops in Baghdad closed down years ago simply because they sold guitars.

Yet that's not to say these young men were writing and performing in a complete vacuum. The rare shows they were able to do in Baghdad usually attracted at least a dozen or two other young Iraqi men who had also been indoctrinated into the Western hard rock and heavy metal of Metallica, System of a Down and Megadeth. Yet, while being encouraged by their tiny but fanatical fanship, there was a small price to pay. In "Heavy Metal in Baghdad", the group recounts an early gig in which a necessary concession to the pre-invasion government was that they sing a song in praise of Saddam Hussein. The song wasn't shit, as Acrassicauda is quick to establish yet the lyrics were pure bullshit. That may be a difficult thing for some of you to distinguish but to an artist, the dividing line is clear. And these guys are real artists. They're the real fucking deal, as the video below ("Garden of Stones") proves.

Just when you've had enough
It's really getting tough

I'm ready for that hit between the eyes
Someone get me out of here alive
I'm ready for that hit between the eyes
Can't you see I'm much too young to die

You can feel the tension in the street
There's no escape, getting closer to the heat
You play with fire, get your fingers burned
It's too late, past the point of no return

Other young musicians play until their fingers bleed. Acrassicauda played until their family bled. By 2006, all the band's members had relocated piecemeal to Damascus, Syria, a place where Iraqis are treated as being "less than zero." In order to preserve the Syrian infrastructure, the 1.2 million Iraqi refugees weren't allowed to legally work unless they found menial labor making $100 a month working 12 hour days, seven days a week because their employers knew they couldn't complain. Back in Baghdad, the band would go for a year or two between gigs. Two of the founding members, though close friends, lived fifteen minutes from each other but the danger and curfews would make them go five or six months without their meeting.

In Syria, a safer country, their reception was hardly what one would call welcoming. Heavy metal in Syria and all over the Middle East is rarer than Jewish rappers. The band was so close to giving up that they'd played a make-or-break gig at a night club in Damascus. Bassist Firas Al-Lateef, front man and rhythm guitarist Faisal Talal, drummer Marwan Riyadh and lead guitarist Tony Aziz, one of the most electrifying new talents I've ever seen, would've hung it up if they couldn't get the crowd into it.

After a few covers, it didn't start out promisingly. But then they started doing their own material, including "Massacre" (which they pronounce ma-SOCCER), the young men in the club got into it and they were given a new lease on life.

While heavily influenced by System of a Down and Metallica and being the genuine article, an Arabic influence understandably shows, especially in some of the riffs played in "Garden of Stones" by the shy but brilliant Tony Aziz. Their music achieves a virtually impossible synthesis of heavy metal and traditional Arabic chords. But in their music, this and the subject matter is their only nod to their Iraqi background. They'd fit seamlessly into Ozzfest. But they will never let you forget that they're Iraqi in either their tracks or videos. Slipknot has the corn fields of Iowa. Acrassicauda has the battlefields of Baghdad. These aren't political statements but bloody nuggets of a heritage midwifed by a brutal and negligent occupying government, as organic as any blood-carrying organ.

After getting forced out of Syria, they spent another term of purgatory in Istanbul, Turkey while struggling to keep the group together and to get as much of their families out of Iraq as possible and to find a permanent home while scratching to support themselves. While in Iraq, their equipment and rehearsal spot was obliterated by different bombings (of American origin), they were robbed on the way to Damascus and what little gear they'd subsequently cobbled together they had to sell to pay the rent. If any rock and roll story defines stubborn, almost pathological perseverance, it's Acrassicauda.

Finally, after being granted refugee status by the State Department, the band made it to William Carlos Williams' old haunts in Elizabeth, New Jersey. At long last, things began looking up for the band and they were actually able to meet James Hetfield of Metallica, who magnanimously presented a dumbfounded Mr. Talal with one of his own guitars which he then signed.

One must never forget the 1,000,000 Iraqis that had died, the 2.5 million we had displaced and the countless hundreds of thousands if not millions of the largely undocumented wounded as a result of our invasion and occupation. Our senseless squattage and raping of Iraq is racking up a debt that we can barely hope to repay. And while Metallica's James Hetfield hardly represents our government or even serves as an international goodwill ambassador, he, Vice Records, the International Rescue Committee and their growing legion of fans are showing this quartet that not all Americans are bad and that we're willing to accept them into the country that had displaced them, welcoming them on their terms not merely as refugees but as recording artists in their own right.

Toward the end of the documentary, just before the Vice crew left Iraq to go back to New York, the group was shown the raw material that had been filmed in the years since the documentary began (October 2003, early in the occupation). Only after viewing the DVD did the bitterness toward Americans reveal itself, a justified anger felt not just for the members of Acrassicauda but all Iraqis whose lives had been brutally ended and upended.

But this brief video of the band meeting James Hetfield backstage is a necessary counterpoint to that bitterness. The ESP's gift was a necessary, if unofficial, redemption and reward for them keeping the faith in a way that our government did not keep for the Iraqi people (if we ever held any). While not serving as an apology on any level, what Hetfield and Vice did (the latter kicking in as much as $40,000 at a time to keep them alive) was a necessary first step toward healing the first four of 26,000,000 wounds that may or may not be sealed with scar tissue in the years and decades to come.

Their dedication to a purely western style of music should not be viewed as the triumph of the endemic nature of western culture but one of the human spirit. To this day, they're still looking for a record label and have produced and recorded nothing more substantial than the 2009 EP entitled "Only the Dead See the End of the War."

Labels: music

It's out there. It's very, very faint right now, but it's trying to get louder. That sound you hear is the recognition, even among some in the media, that screaming "The terrorists are gonna getcha!" is not exactly the way to project strength and courage in the face of a threat. Getting a boner over an attempted terrorist attack for political gain is not the way to show how much you love your country. Hoping for another attack because you think it'll help you regain power is what traitors do, not what patriots do. Jonathan Alter advocates that Barack Obama meet with Dick Cheney -- not to find common ground, but to tell him in no uncertain terms that his remarks are traitorous and to shut the fuck up. Chris Matthews chastises Politico for serving as the official media outlet of Cheney's ravings. And the more unhinged the right gets, the more they look like fearmongers and less like national security experts...and the more their lust for absolute power demonstrates that they WANT terrorists to succeed. They WANT death on a mass scale here in this country. They WANT these things because they think it will bring them back to power.

Who's emoboldening terrorists? Who's egging them on? It isn't liberals and it isn't President Obama. It's the very right wing that fancies itself to be the "real patriots":

As I noted yesterday, it is true that one of the goals of terrorism is to elicit a wild over-reaction from the target government, resulting in greater publicity and a larger pool of potential recruits for the terrorists’ cause, and so any response has to be balanced against that. But the idea that “the strategic goals of al Qaeda” are better advanced by more security theater at American airports than they were by, say, inducing the United States to invade and occupy two Muslim countries and engage in a global campaign of kidnapping and torture, is just ridiculous on its face.

But this is largely beside the point, because conservatives like Kristol, Hume, and Doan aren’t genuinely (or at least primarily) interested in analyzing threats and policies to deal with them, they’re interested in promoting a specific, and politically advantageous, narrative about the nature of those threats. And apparently, the possibility of those threats serving as Al Qaeda propaganda is a price they’re willing to pay in order to achieve that political advantage.

And that's what nutballs like Peter King and Jim DeMint and the rest of these assholes need to be told...repeatedly....everytime they open their idiotic pieholes.

Labels: domestic terrorism, treason

Hoarders. We all know 'em. Some of us have family members who are hoarders. Some of us ARE hoarders. Some of us are hoarders who are trying not to hoard. Some of us try, when we have time, to declutter, only to find entropy setting in again. I wrote in 2008 about the show Clean House, which takes a somewhat more humorous look at clutter.

But clutter isn't just something we battle with in our homes. It isn't just old catalogs, dozens packages of toilet paper and cans of tomatoes that were on sale, old Sunday New York Times Magazine sections from two years ago that you swear you'll do the puzzle sometime. Data can be clutter too. Where I work, you have to hang onto every version of every single document you generate. So you'd better like creating folders in Windows, or you'll be screwed. This is "data clutter."

The problem with data clutter, like any other clutter, is that the more you accumulate, the more trouble you'll have finding what you need. Just as you keep buying voltage testers because you can't find one when you need it, you can't find the guy who's plotting a terrorist attack when you have 500,000 names on a list of potential terrorists (including, presumably, some political enemies of the previous administration). You can't find anything that might be meaningful when combined with other data if you're sweeping up the online home shopping habits of a little old lady in Grand Rapids.

If you read only one article about the surveillance state that George Bush left us and Barack Obama seems bound and determined to continue, read this one by Glenn Greenwald:

Every debate over expanded government surveillance power is invariably framed as one of "security v. privacy and civil liberties" -- as though it's a given that increasing the Government's surveillance authorities will "make us safer."  But it has long been clear that the opposite is true.  As numerous experts (such as Rep. Rush Holt) have attempted, with futility, to explain, expanding the scope of raw intelligence data collected by our national security agencies invariably impedes rather than bolsters efforts to detect terrorist plots.  This is true for two reasons:  (1) eliminating strict content limits on what can be surveilled (along with enforcement safeguards, such as judicial warrants) means that government agents spend substantial time scrutinizing and sorting through communications and other information that have nothing to do with terrorism; and (2) increasing the quantity of what is collected makes it more difficult to find information relevant to actual terrorism plots.  As Rep. Holt put it when arguing against the obliteration of FISA safeguards and massive expansion of warrantless eavesdropping power which a bipartisan Congress effectuated last year:

It has been demonstrated that when officials must establish before a court that they have reason to intercept communications -- that is, that they know what they are doing -- we get better intelligence than through indiscriminate collection and fishing expeditions.

Read more.....

So the next time your wingnut colleague tells you that if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't object to the government sweeping up all your phone calls and internet activity, remind him of the guy down the hall, the one who reminds you of Milton from Office Space, the one with 27 years of papers scattered willy-nilly across his desk who can't find anything in the avalanche of paper.

Labels: surveillance

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

Less than 24 hours after Senator Byron Dorgan, the senior senator from North Dakota, announced he will not seek reelection this fall, word began leaking out that Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut will follow him out the door. The speculation in both cases is that Dorgan and Dodd wish to spend more time with lobbyists and corporate special interests.

With their retirement after the 2010 midterms and Senator Ted Kennedy's death last August, the Democratic Party will be losing more than just three fabulous heads of hair. Add to the defections seat-warmer Roland Burris of Illinois announcing way back last year that he would not seek to retain his seat now that he can put "US Senator" on his mausoleum, Ted Kaufman of Delaware having no interest in keeping Joe Biden's old seat and 92 year-old Robert Byrd of West Virginia is obviously on the way out. Kirsten Gillibrand's and Paul Kirk's seats are up for grabs in New York and Massachusetts, respectively, and it looks as if the Democrats' chances of maintaining their 60 seat majority look pretty dim.

And that's just as well. The fractious Democratic Party in both chambers have done at least as much damage as Joe Lieberman and his allies in the obstructionist GOP, shattering (hopefully) the myth of the invincible filibuster-proof majority.

The news isn't all grim: In the Nutmeg State, the usual speculation and jockeying for position has already begun and Dodd's seat is already being unofficially handed over to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who'd already announced his intention to run for Dodd's seat before Dodd had a chance to make his announcement. Despite Dodd's wild unpopularity since the financial meltdown and his embarrassing kitchen table presidential campaign, Barack Obama handily carried Connecticut during his own campaign. With Blumenthal's already high numbers in the Connecticut straw polls, he ought to make a mockery of any Republican wannabes like WWE bozoette Linda McMahon.

Dorgan of North Dakota, Gillibrand of New York, Kirk of Massachusetts, Kaufman of Delaware, and Burris of Illinois are different stories entirely. Dorgan's seat is already credibly contested by North Dakota Republicans and Gillibrand, Kaufman, Kirk and Burris have simply been in the Senate far too briefly to restore any credibility for their party let alone build up personal reputations. There are no more Obamas in the Senate.

North Dakota Gov. John Hoeven was projected in a poll a few weeks ago to beat Dorgan by a healthy 58-36 margin and is quite popular among Republican voters.

Gillibrand's main GOP rival, it would seem, is Rep. Peter King, a typical Republican hair-on-fire alarmist who made headlines during the holidays following the attempted Flight 253 bombing. King would have to raise between $30-40 million, by his own estimate and travel all over the state to run for Gillibrand's seat. Yet out of all the GOP contenders in New York, King is the only one with any national recognition.

Don't laugh. King's got a chance should he decide to run. We're talking about the same country that saw fit to elect laughingstocks like honorary redneck Bobby Jindal, Sonny Bono, Michele Bachmann, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura to public office, to say nothing about voting enough times for an intellectual and moral anorexic like George W. Bush to make two thefts of the presidency seem plausible.

When Obama began plundering the Senate for talent after his election, worries of a brain drain on the left side of the aisle were waved aside with confident arguments that the state governors in question would appoint Democrats. So one by one we saw Democrats leave the Senate, starting with Biden, then Clinton, then Ken Salazar. Seat warmers were appointed, two of whom deciding not to run for re-election and with the failing Byrd, the departing Dorgan and Dodd and the potentially vulnerable Gillibrand and the 71 year-old Paul Kirk, the argument of Democratic governors making Democratic appointments to the Senate is a tack that now seems short-sighted.

The other day I was reading this post at Jezebel about so-called "purity balls" and one of the fathers in the piece set of loud alarms and screeching sirens in my own personal gaydar. (If you go over there, you'll see the one I'm talking about.) If I do say so myself, I have pretty good gaydar for a straight person. I'm not about outing, though, mostly because there are people who are so much better at it (and far more influential) than I am. But then there are those who transcend sexual orientation, who manage to get the point across without ever using the word "closet."

I bring you, Gen. J.C. Christian, Patriot.

Labels: bloggers, closet cases, humor

There's the world as we'd like it to be, and then there's the world as it is. We might want to live in the utopian world we'd like, but instead we live in the hypocritical, double-standard world that exists now. In this world, a successful terrorist attack that kills 3000 people shows George W. Bush is a strong leader and a failed one that kills no one shows Barack Obama is a pussy. In this world, John Ensign can remain in office after his parents pay off his mistress' husband and still oppose gay marriage, David Vitter can utilize the services of paid prostitutes to dress him in diapers and still preach about family values and morality, and Mark Sanford can use state funds to fly first class to do the horizontal mambo with his Argentine sweetie and not be removed from office. And this is all OK because they are Republicans. Just like the clean-slate Christianity they follow; the same one that Brit Hume says offers the best deal at the lowest price for Tiger Woods to achieve redemption, Republicans are held to a different standard. They're held to a different standard by the media, and therefore they're held to a different standard by most Americans. The IOKYAR doctrine is the de facto law of the land, and it is not going to change.

There are many reasons this is the law of the land. Some of it is about the corporations that run the media; corporations that instinctively prefer Republican governance. Some of it is undoubtedly due to whatever it is in our nature that makes some of us care what happens to our fellow human beings, and others of us join the "I got mine and fuck you" brigade; guys like Rush Limbaugh who declare that the health care system is fine because HE, with his $400 million contract that's bankrupting Clear Channel, can afford the best insurance and the best care money can buy. But whatever it is, when Republicans are caught in major scandals, they tough it out, and when Democrats are caught in minor scandals, they throw in the towel.

A great deal of hosannas have been expressed on the left at Rick Sanchez' "evisceration" of John Ensign on ethics issues the other day, but I didn't see it as an evisceration at all. Kudos to Sanchez for confronting this hypocritical asshole, but at the end of the day, Ensign stuck to his story and went back to the Senate.

Today, the New York Times reports that Sen. Chris Dodd will not seek re-election, and that even though there was no actual wrongdoing, the "appearance of impropriety" is enough when you're a Democrat to cause your approval ratings to go down the toilet:

Mr. Dodd has been a fixture in the Senate since his election in 1980 and had been at the center of the contentious recent debates on overhauling the health care system and financial regulation. In November he proposed an overhaul that included consolidating bank regulators, creating a consumer financial protection agency and imposing new restraints on exotic financial instruments and credit rating agencies.

But his standing in Connecticut had been on the decline starting when he made an unsuccessful run for the presidency in 2008 — moving his family to Iowa — and when questions arose about a disputed loan he took from Countrywide Financial, the fallen subprime company.

On the Republican side, Mr. Dodd faced the prospect of running against Linda McMahon, a political novice who was prepared to use her vast personal fortune to beat the incumbent senator. Also challenging the senator was former Representative Rob Simmons, a Republican.

Mr. Dodd’s troubles escalated in 2008 when he was one of two Democratic senators — the other was Kent Conrad of North Dakota — who had been accused of receiving improper discounts from Countrywide Financial. In August, the Senate Select Committee on Ethics ruled that it had found “no credible evidence” that the senators had violated gift rules in accepting the loans.

But the committee criticized Mr. Dodd and Mr. Conrad for not avoiding the appearance of impropriety.

Both Mr. Dodd and Mr. Conrad had been members of the “Friends of Angelo” V.I.P. program at the bank, named after Angelo R. Mozilo, the chief executive of Countrywide.

Polling in Connecticut suggested that Mr. Dodd had been hurt both by his association with Countrywide and by criticism for his role in legislation that appeared to clear the way for bonuses to be paid to executives of American International Group, the insurance firm that received a government bailout.

I'm not excusing Dodd for clearing the way for AIG bonuses; it's yet another example, right up there with the money Democrats are taking from insurance companies to prevent Americans from being protected from insurance company excesses, of how money corrupts Democrats just as much as Republican. I think much of Dodd's downfall is about the Countrywide loan, though I'm not convinced that a bank program called "Friends of Angelo" is necessarily anything more than a marketing ploy by a company trying to make its CEO the public face of the company to make it look more cute and cuddly. The problem is that when you're a member of such a program, and THEN you clear the way for executives of a company that insures banks to get big fat bonuses after a bailout with taxpayer money, at BEST you're showing a tin ear to the concerns of your constituents.

But the reality of our society, and our political system is that John McCain gets to survive being one of the Keating Five and then run for president as a "great American hero", but Chris Dodd has to leave office.

The challenge right now isn't the Senate seat in Connecticut, however. It's what we do about a system in which no scandal is heinous enough to force out a Republican, and no scandal is trivial enough for a Democrat to survive. Perhaps Democrats by nature lack the finely-honed scumbag gene that allows them to justify any kind of lapse strongly and vociferously. Perhaps it's that the kind of money required in our system to run a successful campaign can only be acquired by being on the take, and that the system is rigged against Democrats being on the take BECAUSE we're supposed to care more about the have-nots or the have-lesses. But the bottom line is that Democrats have to find a way to be 100% squeaky clean and still pull in enough money to be successful, or else find the arrogance that Republicans have in weathering such storms. But if they do the latter, then what will there be about them to support?

Labels: Chris Dodd, corruption, double standards

Late last year, on Christmas day and the day before New Year's Eve, jihadists from both the Taliban and, allegedly, al Qaeda, embarrassed the United States. On Christmas a Nigerian citizen was allowed to get on a plane in Amsterdam with an incendiary device sewn into his underwear despite having been put on a terror watch list. Last Wednesday, a Taliban militant, a physician named Humam Khalil Mohammed, blew up himself and eight others at a CIA base in southeastern Afghanistan.

What makes these attacks and the successful infiltration of agents from two terrorist networks especially embarrassing is that a little bit of additional vetting would've turned up their true intentions. Farouk Abdulmutallab's own father had warned the US embassy in Nigeria that his son had been radicalized and Dr. Mohammed's dedication to jihad was well-documented in al Qaeda's online magazine (Yes, they have an online magazine just like Salon.com and Wired). The only thing that shielded Mohammed's identity was an online pseudonym. A nom de plume apparently is good enough to foil the most heavily-funded and technologically sophisticated intelligence-gathering network on earth.

Compare this to the recently publicized apprehension of a drug dealer when a small town Indiana deputy tracked him down in Canada through his activities on the online RPG game World of Warcraft (although it can be assumed Blizzard Entertainment's level of cooperation was higher than that which would've been offered by al Qaeda to CIA investigators).

There are several parallels and lessons we can take away from this, such as this being the second time in as many months that a trusted doctor had taken American lives. And, in spite of documented evidence proving their real loyalties, lax Homeland Security and TSA guidelines that govern all airports for flights inbound to the United States put Farouk Abdulmutallab on a plane to Detroit.

Five days later, the trusted Jordanian GID (General Intelligence Directorate) implanted on a secret CIA base in Afghanistan a double agent whose purported purpose was to root out al Qaeda terrorists. Not only did it expose our vulnerability it also embarrassed the Jordanian government that understandably didn't want it to be known they were working in such collusion with US intelligence. It also made a mockery of them criticizing the CIA for relying too much on technology and not enough on humint (human intelligence) such as when we got our cues for invading Iraq from an alcoholic named "Curveball", Jordanian-convicted criminal Ahmad Chalabi and a taxi driver.

In other words, we were punked by two Muslim Trojan horses within a week in spite of a $50 billion annual budget financing 16 intelligence agencies. Welcome back to the Bronze Age of intelligence gathering.

The sad thing in all this is that, unlike the Trojans, we didn't have a Laocoön to warn us of Greeks (or Jordanians) bearing gifts.

Laocoön was the priest who'd warned the Trojans that the Greeks' Trojan horse shouldn't be trusted. The anti-Trojan, pro-Greek Poseidon sent two serpents to strangle Laocoön before he could be believed in much the same manner that the anti-Iraqi, pro-American Bush administration killed off in a manner of speaking our next-to-last Laocoön. His name was Richard Clarke. The last was Joseph Wilson.

The problem is, we have too many Poseidons and not enough Trojan soldiers. Throughout the entire Bush administration, whistleblowers had suffered persecution (and, in the case of Susan Lindauer, prosecution as well) for simply doing their jobs and their patriotic duty. Joseph Wilson's wife was outed as a covert agent after he'd blown to smithereens the Bush administration's rationale for going to war with Iraq. FBI translator Sibel Edmonds had been slapped with a gag order. Clarke was ignored and became the male Cassandra, an irrelevant relic of the Clinton years. Bunny Greenhouse was fired for turning up inconvenient truths regarding defense contracts and Lindauer was tried, ironically, as a double agent for Iraqi intelligence.

And the US spy network is apparently so interested in proprietary intelligence that affects the security of the entire nation that they'd willingly keep rival agencies in the dark, making it all but impossible for analysts and case agents to connect the dots.

Blogger Alicia Morgan recently told me in a conversation that her son had been put on a terrorist watch list since he was eight years old. Why are we putting children, respected authors and even revered United States Senators on terrorist watch lists while gullibly rolling people like Dr. Nidal Hasan, Farouk Abdulmutallab and Dr. Humam Khalil Mohammed in our midst when they were certainly not shy about their true intentions?

Perhaps we should be looking more gift horses in the mouth.

I can't believe what I was just watching on Countdown. Richard Wolffe is reporting that the Obama Administration plans to investigate whether intelligence information relative to the December 25 attempted airplane bombing was deliberately withheld. The question being asked is whether this is some kind of turf war among intelligence agencies -- the kind of turf war that was supposed to have stopped after the 9/11 attacks; or if the withholding of information was somehow deliberate -- "designed to make someone look bad."

I'm astounded that ANYONE in the press, let alone the Obama administration, is willing to go there. Because when you look at this information Wolffe is receiving in the context of Dick Cheney coming out of his hidey-hole to call Barack Obama weak on national security, it's not hard to imagine whom it was designed to make look bad. And if that's where the Administration is going, then we have something that some of us have been open to ever since that night in September 2001 when Larry Kudlow was on CNBC grinning from ear to ear because the attacks meant an end to any talk of a Social Security "lockbox"; one that should scare the bejeezus out of all of us -- that there are elements in this country's intelligence apparatus who are willing, even eager, to allow terrorist attacks to take place for Republican political gain.

We'll know more about this investigation tomorrow, when the President makes a statement around 4:00 PM Eastern time.

I'll post the clip as soon as I can get it.

UPDATE: Here it is:


...and Rachel's take:

Labels: 9/11, LIHOP, terrorism, tinfoil

There just are no words:

Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.

The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior.

One month after the conference, a previously unknown Ugandan politician, who boasts of having evangelical friends in the American government, introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which threatens to hang homosexuals, and, as a result, has put Uganda on a collision course with Western nations.

[snip]

The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill.

“I feel duped,” Mr. Schmierer said, arguing that he had been invited to speak on “parenting skills” for families with gay children. He acknowledged telling audiences how homosexuals could be converted into heterosexuals, but he said he had no idea some Ugandans were contemplating the death penalty for homosexuality.

“That’s horrible, absolutely horrible,” he said. “Some of the nicest people I have ever met are gay people.”

Mr. Lively and Mr. Brundidge have made similar remarks in interviews or statements issued by their organizations. But the Ugandan organizers of the conference admit helping draft the bill, and Mr. Lively has acknowledged meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to discuss it. He even wrote on his blog in March that someone had likened their campaign to “a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.” Later, when confronted with criticism, Mr. Lively said he was very disappointed that the legislation was so harsh.

Bullshit. Laughable bullshit. Scott Lively has a peculiar obsession with manly men. In this screed (h/t), he gives us a peek into what clearly makes him all sweaty and tingly:

Where is the masculine Jesus of the Bible in the life of today’s church? The Jesus who threw down the tables of the moneychangers and drove them out of the temple with a whip? The Jesus who faced down and tamed the Gerasene demoniac? The Jesus who, to their faces, excoriated the cultural and political leaders of the day as a “brood of vipers ” and “whitewashed sepulchers full of dead men ‘ s bones?” This masculine Jesus has been ejected from the American church. In His place is a false and emasculated Christ, as submissive and fearful of controversy as the men who now lead His flock.

Mmmmmmm.....Jesus with a whip. But it gets worse:

The church and this nation cry out for a revival of masculine Christianity, which is to say that we church leaders need to stop being such, for lack of a better word, sissies when it comes to social and political issues. We need to spend as much time confronting perpetrators as we do comforting victims. We need to do less fretting and more fighting for righteousness. For every motherly, feminine ministry of the church such as a Crisis Pregnancy Center or ex-gay support group, we need a battle-hardened, take-it-to-the-enemy masculine ministry like Operation Rescue (questions of civil disobedience aside). For every God-hating radical in government, academia and media we need a bold, no-nonsense, truth-telling Christian counterpart: trained, equipped and endorsed by the local church.

Yes, friends, misogyny and closetry in one hiding-behind-a-cardboard-cutout-o'Jesus package.

Now let's look at Caleb Lee Brundidge, shall we? Brundidge is on the staff of Richard Cohen's so-called "International Healing Foundation." Remember Richard Cohen? He's this guy:

Brundidge is the "staffer" mentioned and pictured in Rachel's introduction.

Ted Cox of Box Turtle Bulletin went undercover in Cohen's organization and spent some time with Brundidge, who also claims to be able to raise the dead.

As for Don Schmierer, Tim Kincaid outlines BTB's attempts to let Schmierer know exactly what he was getting into in Uganda, which makes his protestations that he had no idea what he was being used for more than a little bit disingenuous.

I'm getting sick and tired of watching a bunch of closet cases hide behind the Giant Phallus of Jesus as they spread hate and death around while talking about love and redemption. These people are trying to deal with their own issues about their own sexuality by using the language of therapy in conjunction with a love-based Christianity they DO NOT PRACTICE in an attempt to remove all temptation that might cause them to have to examine their true selves. All this twisting themselves into pretzels may now have real world consequences for real people. And when it does, Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge, Don Schmierer, and the hypocrites of "The Family" will have the blood of these real people on their hands. They don't care, though, because in their view of Christianity, a Jewish guy was nailed to a cross over 2000 years ago so they could get a free pass and do whatever they damn please with no consequences.

Labels: closet cases, gay rights, homophobia, just another outrage

Call me immature, but I REALLY want to do this:


(OK, I'm more the sound of OLD America, but a big tip o'the hat to Jesse Thorn.)

Labels: Comedians

Special bitchin' cold Sunday edition.

Today's MUST-READ post is by Howie Klein, about the Republican pattern of treason and chicanery, even at the expense of national security, designed to sabotage Democrats in election. Of course Barack Obama is too entrenched in his own private Candyland o'Bipartisanship and Harmony to study this history, and Rahmmy is too busy still patting himself on the back about Blue Dog seats the party is guaranteed to lose later this year.


Driftglass: MoDo Doesn't Know Dick.

End of Decade Lists, Movies edition: ModFab.

End of Decade Lists, WTF Were We Thinking edition: Amanda.

Scott on theocrat Gary DeMar's finding the Iron John Moments in fear of flying.

Rick Freedman imagines a WWI headline out of today's Republican Party.

At Raw Story: Tweety's fear of "kung-fu terrorists".

And finally, from the "I can't believe they actually did this" file, after the December 31 space WaPo gave Michael Chertoff to shill for full-body scanners, a policy that would benefit one of his clients, they actually ran an article about Chertoff's conflict of interest on January 1. Of course they didn't say anything about Chertoff's op-ed and their own role in helping him shill, but you can't have everything.

Labels: bloggers

I know I'm a bit late to the party on this, but count this as my first "I am SO there!" moment of 2010:

Just as the characters in Green Day's rock musical American Idiot search for meaning in a chaotic world, so do the fans of that show's score seek an answer to a larger question: When is it coming to Broadway?

A casting notice made public on Nov. 9 indicates that producers are indeed planning a Broadway move for the hot-selling, critically-praised American Idiot, currently playing an extended world-premiere run in Berkeley, CA, through Nov. 15. Until the appearance of this industry casting alert, there has only been mention of a hope for a commercial life for the Michael Mayer-directed musical. "There is a Broadway future for the show, but at this time no dates or theatre are confirmed," spokesman Michael Hartman told Playbill.com on Nov. 9.

The casting notice does not indicate a production schedule or timeline for the dark-hued rock musical, which borrows songs from the punk album of the same name, plus numbers from Green Day's latest album, "21st Century Breakdown."

As was known, Tom Hulce and Ira Pittelman are the lead producers; they were also behind the Tony Award-winning production of Spring Awakening, for which Mayer won a Tony for Best Direction of a Musical.

Yes, it's THAT Tom Hulce, old Wolfie Mozart himself.

Labels: Broadway, music

As soon as I'd finished reading Barry Lynn's article at Alternet about how the monopolization of consumer products puts us all at risk, I found out that while the pet food melamine scandal may be behind us (and I think about that every time I pay a buck-twenty-five a can for Merrick's at Pet Goods), adulterated foods and medicines are not:

The reported death of five cats prompted Teva Animal Health to widen its recall to include all vials of ketamine hydrochloride injection last week, yet the company’s technical services department insists that the action was caused merely by “increased medical events that were kind of unfounded.”

That statement, offered by a Teva technical services representative who did not give her name, has confused some veterinarians. On Dec. 22, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a recall alert, instructing practitioners to stop using all 27 lots of Teva’s ketamine hydrochloride injection, USP CIII 100 mg/ml in 10 ml vials due to “serious adverse events.”

The expiration dates of the lots range from September 2009 to February 2012, the FDA says. Additionally, the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) warns practitioners not to rely on the Teva brand name to determine whether their ketamine falls under the recall. Rather, the following signs offer a better indication:

    * If the lot number is six numeric digits, the product is not part of the recall.
    * If the lot number is seven numeric digits, the product should be returned.
    * If the lot number starts with 5401, regardless of the number of digits or the presence of letters in the lot code, the product should be returned.

According to the FDA, reported problems with Teva’s ketamine include lack of effect, prolonged effect and death.

In response, practitioners have contacted the VIN News Service (VNS) looking for insight into the recall, which originated last summer and, at the time, took effect only at the wholesale level.

Troubles within Teva Animal Health surfaced in late July, when the FDA shut down the company via a permanent injunction and filed a lawsuit, alleging that regulatory inspectors had uncovered adulterated animal drugs at Teva’s main facilities in St. Joseph, Mo. The generics manufacturer agreed to cease production of its drugs and its DVM Pharmaceuticals line of products following a much-publicized crackdown by the FDA on the company’s quality control practices.

At the time, Michael Chappell, the FDA’s acting associate commissioner for regulatory affairs, stated: “The FDA will not tolerate the manufacture and distribution of adulterated animal drugs. Veterinarians and pet owners can be assured that the FDA will investigate and take regulatory actions against companies that produce animal drugs under conditions and controls that are inadequate to assure their safety and quality.”

But Laura Alvey, deputy director of communications with the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM), notes in a recent interview with the VNS that, “FDA’s evaluation was that use or exposure to these products was not likely to cause adverse health consequences.” 

To some, that assessment now appears flawed, considering veterinarians have been ordered to stop using Teva ketamine and to return it to their distributors because of the reported feline deaths.

It's time we realized that thanks to decades of Republican and corporatist Democratic governance, federal agencies that we think are supposed to protect the public, don't. There is always a balancing act with these agencies between protection of the public and the profits of industry. This is why the NTSB and the FAA are not about aviation safety, and the FDA is not about food and drug safety. Because when public safety butts heads with profit, profit always wins.

Even if your pet is not scheduled for surgery, print out the article at the above link and take it to your vet next time you go.

(BIG hat tip)

Labels: corporatism, pets, tainted pet food scandal

...and worse than ever:

Conservative talk radio show host Rush Limbaugh said Friday that tests show nothing wrong with his heart after chest pains hospitalized him earlier this week.

Limbaugh said at a Honolulu news conference that he was being released from The Queen's Medical Center, where he was rushed Wednesday during a vacation. Doctors said he did not have a heart attack or heart disease.

[snip]

Limbaugh couldn't resist a few political comments in the short press conference at the hospital. He said he got the best health treatment in the world "right here in the United States of America."

"I don't think there's one thing wrong with the United States health system," Limbaugh said.

Shorter Rush Limbaugh: I got mine....so fuck you.

You know, I really tried to take the high road here. I didn't post anything, I didn't comment on other blogs that I wished Rush Limbaugh dead. The closest I came was to consider commenting elsewhere to blast the idea that Barack Obama should for some reason show up at Limbaugh's bedside to "take the high road" against this worthless piece of human dung who would probably put a bullet into Obama's head himself if he weren't too big a chickenshit to hold a goddamn gun. But I didn't. What I hoped is that Limbaugh just might think about how you're no longer immortal when you're fifty-eight years old and that maybe it wasn't too late for him to realize that being a selfish, craven, greedy, venal, hatemonger is no way to spend a life.

But when I read things like this, I wonder if perhaps I should have joined the deathwishers. Because Rush Limbaugh is quite simply an evil, evil person. And there's no sin in wishing ill on evil.

Labels: just another outrage, Rush Limbaugh

Today Michael Chertoff, otherwise known as That Guy Who Botched the Hurricane Katrina response, advocates in the increasingly and alarmingly right-wing Washington Post for full-body scanners:

The case of Abdulmutallab shows that we cannot simply "rely on intelligence." Abdulmutallab was not on a watch list that required closer scrutiny. Even if the review President Obama has ordered closes a gap that would have put Abdulmutallab or others on more select watch lists, there are plenty of terrorists out there about whom we know nothing. Too many potentially dangerous people simply would not appear on any watch list. We cannot put all our eggs in the "intelligence basket." That's why, since Sept. 11, 2001, we have worked to establish multiple layers of defense to protect the American people. Watch lists surely are an important layer, as is intelligence-sharing, but others, such as the deployment of advanced detection technology, are just as important.

Claims that the screening amounts to "virtual strip searches" is calculated to alarm the public. As if screening is meant to reveal people's private parts to TSA officers. But the agency has nonetheless taken privacy concerns seriously in creating procedures for using this technology. In deploying the machines, the TSA has strictly limited the number of officers who see the images; separates the officers looking at images from the passengers being screened (so the officers do not know which passengers the images belong to); and uses software to blur the faces on the images -- further protecting the anonymity of passengers. Moreover, the machines are configured to prevent TSA officers from storing or retaining any images. As an additional measure, passengers can choose not to walk through one of the machines and receive a physical examination instead.

In short, the TSA has listened to the reasonable concerns of privacy advocates and incorporated numerous suggestions into its protocols to draw the right balance between security and privacy. The administration must stand firm against privacy ideologues, for whom every security measure is unacceptable. Failing to use all available tools to plug a gap in security puts the lives of airline travelers needlessly at risk.

And failure to use these full-body scanners puts Michael Chertoff's wallet at risk, as we see from the byline (emphasis mine):

The writer was secretary of homeland security from 2005 to 2009 and is co-founder of the Chertoff Group, a security and risk-management firm whose clients include a manufacturer of body-imaging screening machines.

Because government spending is A-OK when it goes in the pockets of the well-connected.

Labels: corporatism, greed, hypocrisy, Michael Chertoff

Raw Story:

Protesters took to the streets in Afghanistan on Wednesday, burning an effigy of the US president and shouting "death to Obama" to slam civilian deaths during Western military operations.

Hundreds of university students blocked main roads in Jalalabad, capital of eastern Nangahar province, to protest the alleged deaths of 10 civilians, mostly school children, in a Western military operation on Saturday.

"The government must prevent such unilateral operations otherwise we will take guns instead of pens and fight against them (foreign forces)," students from the University of Nangahar's education faculty said in a statement.

Marching through the main street of Jalalabad, the students chanted "death to Obama" and "death to foreign forces", witnesses said.

The protesters torched a US flag and an effigy of US President Barack Obama in a public square in central Jalalabad, before dispersing.

"Our demonstration is against those foreigners who have come to our country," Safiullah Aminzai, a student organiser, told AFP.

"They have not brought democracy to Afghanistan but they are killing our religious scholars and children," he added.

Civilian deaths in the eight-year war to eradicate a Taliban-led insurgency are a sensitive issue for the Afghan public, and fan tensions between President Hamid Karzai and the 113,000 foreign troops supporting his government.

A similar protest was planned in Kabul against the "killing of civilians, especially the recent killing of students in Kunar by foreign forces," said organisers from the youth wing of Jamiat Eslah, or the Afghan Society for Social Reform and Development.

"The demonstration is to show our hatred, anger and sorrow about the current situation," said Sayed Khalid Rashid.

"Our main request is that the American and NATO forces must leave the country and Afghan people must have political autonomy," he said, adding that he expected hundreds of people to turn out for the march through western Kabul.

2009 started with the promise of a different way forward and a return of America's prestige as a role model in the world. It ended with the President who embodied that promise being burned in effigy in the very place he plans to escalate an 8-year-old futile war.

And so it goes....

Labels: despair, the more things change the more they stay the same

It's really too bad that "Don't trust the government with any role in regulation of health care coverage" is the subtext that keeps seeping through Bobo's op-ed in the New York Times today, because otherwise it would be a piece he should have written during the Big Daddy era of George W. Bush, who treated Americans like children who needed to be lied to about the risks we face:

...there was a realistic sense that human institutions are necessarily flawed. History is not knowable or controllable. People should be grateful for whatever assistance that government can provide and had better do what they can to be responsible for their own fates.

That mature attitude seems to have largely vanished. Now we seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved. We seem to be in the position of young adolescents — who believe mommy and daddy can take care of everything, and then grow angry and cynical when it becomes clear they can’t.

[snip]

For better or worse, over the past 50 years we have concentrated authority in centralized agencies and reduced the role of decentralized citizen action. We’ve done this in many spheres of life. Maybe that’s wise, maybe it’s not. But we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney treated Americans like children, who needed to be told that their Big Swinging Dick Daddy Wars would keep them 100% safe. That if we just invaded enough countries or dropped enough bombs or eliminated enough freedoms, they could be 100% safe and never, ever, ever die and nothing bad would ever happen to them. Now we have Joe Lieberman advocating turning Yemen into a sheet of glass, we are still in George Bush's phony ginned-up war in Iraq, and we are escalating in Afghanistan. And there are those who think that if we just go to war against enough guys who think that dying will get them laid by 72 virgins in heaven, there will be ABSOLUTELY ZERO RISK to being an American. We will never, ever die and we will live forever.

In my neighborhood, after this winter is over, we will once again see parents putting their kids in what is practically full body armor before letting them get on a bicycle. They don't teach the kids to ride single file; I see entire families riding four abreast with the kids on the outside. But they put kids in helmets and kneepads and elbow pads and wrist guards, thinking this will keep them safe. I used to work with someone whose son was one of the last kids in the state killed on a bicycle before the helmet laws went into effect here in New Jersey. Since the helmet law was passed, parents have deluded themselves into thinking that a helmet will 100% assure that their kids are safe. They are wrong.

And yet when George Bush got up and said that if we just eviscerate everything we stand for; if we give up all our freedoms and allow him to torture anyone he wants to, we can all go to bed with visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads every night and we will never, ever die. And Americans believed it, because it is more comforting to think that a National Guard deserter and dry drunk can keep us 100% safe than to recognize that we live in a world of risk. I never believed that, and it has nothing to do with partisanship. I drive the Garden State Parkway to work every day, in a section where some genius decided that there should be no shoulder on the right and a large one on the left, so that there is nothing between the right-hand-lane and the Passaic River but a concrete divider that doesn't even come up to the door handle of the average car, and where the average prevailing speed is around 75 in a construction zone. So I know that on any day, I could leave the house for work and not come home. It's a risk I have to take because I have to earn a living. One has to leave the house in order to live.

I feel the same way when I agree with David Brooks as I do when Chris Matthews steps out of his Village head -- that what's infuriating about these guys is that they know better. And that they are willfully stupid because it buys them access and invitations to the right parties.

Labels: American Idiots, David Brooks, terrorism

With Dick Cheney emerging from his hidey-hold to call Barack Obama a pussy and a Threat to America, it would seem to be time to declare that all previous agreements to not look backwards are off, and that it's full speed ahead on investigation of the crimes of George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney.

Especially now that it's pretty clear that the Bush Administration's torture tactics were NOT for the purpose of stopping a potential terrorist attack, but were instead used to further the aim of ginning up a phony Iraq/Al Qaeda link to justify their dick-waving war in Iraq.

As usual, only Rachel Maddow has the guts to report the truth:

I know that we have a great many problems to deal with in this country. But if you think that any of the potential Republican hopefuls for 2012 aren't looking at the Bushcheney tactics and thinking "I'd like to do that", guess again.

Of course, I'm not necessarily convinced that Barack Obama hasn't embraced them as well.

So if you want to know what makes a 23-year-old from a privileged background decide to sign up with jihadists, perhaps it's because the leaders of the country the jihadists want to attack decided it was perfectly OK to use torture to gin up a phony case for war against a country that did nothing to us.

Labels: Bush Administration crimes, Rachel Maddow, real journalism